Sole Survivor
by Spats Columbo
Summary: What would happen if an infection broke out on the Enterprise-D that reanimated dead tissue? The only survivor would be the only unsusceptible one, Data.
1. Stranded

They stepped off of the transporter pad and into the empty room, phasers in their holsters. Everyone on this ship was already dead. There was nothing to be afraid of. Two men and a woman adjusted their masks to keep the virus from affecting them. One of the men kicked over an empty canister next to the pad and made a noise of disgust.

"This place is nasty." The other man answered while the woman took some samples from a kind of sludge clinging to the wall.

"Nick, this ship has been sitting here for a year with a rampant disease that offed all of the-" He drew his weapon, "Did you hear that?" A scraping noise stopped his thoughts as he drew his phaser. He went into a protective half crouch and aimed towards the half open door.

Nick also drew his weapon and pointed it at the door slowly walked towards it. He leaned up against the wall, doing his best to shield his body from the open corridor. "Jed, there's nothing out here," he looked back towards his friend, lowering his weapon. Jed threw a suspicious look towards the hallway but also started to relax. "I guess I've just got an itchy trigger finger," he turned to speak to the woman who was still examining the sludge. "Mana, you getting anything over there?"

Mana turned her head just barely catching a glimpse of a hand grabbing Nick's hair and probably breaking his neck as it snapped him into the hallway. "NICK!" She pulled her phaser and aimed a quick shot at the thing in the hallway. Nick's body hit the wall as the thing screamed at her. Jed's head snapped towards the entrance. He threw a quick, practiced shot where Mana's had missed.

The monster's head almost made a one-eighty on it's deteriorated neck as it spun to the ground, out of commission. Mana ran past Jed, hurdling the monster and grabbing her med kit. She knelt next to Nick in the dark hallway, not bothering to check her surroundings before she attended him. Bad idea.

Jed moved towards the creature and knelt down to examine it. "Mana…I thought everyone on this ship was dead…." His horrified face looked up to her as she dropped Nick's hand.

"They are. Including Nick. He didn't have a chance, that guy broke his neck…not a chance." She closed Nick's eyes and grabbed one of his legs. "Jed, help me put him on the transporter pad."

"What? Mana, he's dea-"

"Help. Me." She pronounced each word solidly making sure that she got her point across. Jed just nodded and grabbed his other leg, shooting cautious glances down either side of the hall and listening. They moved Nick's body to the pad quickly and tapped their com links. "Nordic, this is Roland. Ready to beam back."

No answer.

"Nordic. Come in, this is doctor Roland. Beam us up. We've got a man down and apparently there's still something alive on this ship."

Nothing. Jed tried his communicator but got the same result. "What do we do?"

"There's nothing we can do. We might as well grab some more samples, and apparently there are survivors of this disease."

"Mana, you're not worried that our ship's not answering? Nick is _dead_, and what do you mean survivors!? That thing almost snapped his head clean off and you want to collect _samples_?" He gestured towards Nick's unnaturally twisted neck.

"Jed, we read no signs of life on the tricorder but that guy was obviously alive. That's worth checking out. Plus if that guy's here, that means there have got to be others."

"Did you even look at that thing? It's rotted. I'd say a years worth of deterioration at least. That was death…like…living death or something." "Living death? Do you have any idea how stupid you sound?"

"Mana! What if this disease somehow can like, reanimate dead tissue or something? I've heard stories about that kind of thing…like, y'know…zombies."

"Zombies." It wasn't even a question. Just a statement of mockery. "Ok fine. Zombies, but we're still collecting samples."

"Mana, please!" he was almost willing to kiss her feet so that she wouldn't make him go. "Listen, what about Nick, we can't just leave him here." Mana gave Jed a look he knew very well. The look that meant_, __how did you ever get into a security detail?_

"_C'mon. We've got work." Mana peered out into the hallway, holding her tricorder in an awkward fashion almost as if she were unsure of its integrity in this particular situation. Jed drew his phaser and crept up behind her. "Sometimes I think you're not human. You didn't even flinch at Nick's death, and that thing doesn't freak you out?"_

_Mana knelt next to the body of the monster. "You're right. This man's human, and he's a Fleet officer, and…he's dead. If I were to look at him, I'd say almost nine months worth of contained decomposition."_

"_See what I mean? It's this disease, and if everyone on board was affected, we're gonna have our own private zombie horde on our hands." Jed looked nervously up and down the hallway, keeping his voice low as to not attract attention. Mana stood up and also looked around the corner down the hallway._

"_Well, we won't get anywhere by standing here. Let's try to find the med quarters. They're built for situations of quarantine, if there are any survivo-…living survivors they'll be there." She walked off boldly down the grungy hallway occasionally side stepping a spatter of suspicious looking liquid, with Jed quietly in tow. _


	2. Arachnophobia

"I can't believe we haven't seen anymore of those things." Jed still held his phaser up and aimed at anything that had a menacing look. The silence was starting to grate on his nerves and his trigger finger was becoming itchier with every step.

"They're probably hiding…that or we're not making enough noise." Mana stopped at a turn and peered around the corner. "Speak of the devil…" she whispered, Mana pointed down the hallway towards a small group of the creatures crowded around another. Jed held his breath, the creatures weren't anything he wanted to tangle with more than once.

Jed stepped gingerly into the hallway and trained his phaser on one of the monster. He held up three fingers towards Mana. She understood the signal to mean that he could kill three before they started attacking. That left another three unaccounted for. Mana knew that if it came down to a battle that she wouldn't offer much help, but she'd dragged him this far in pursuit of samples that definitely weren't worth her life.

Manna nodded an ok. Jed turned towards the zombies and started busting heads.

Jed was able to get four down before the other two turned and screamed down the hallway. The first came crawling along the floor, at what Jed guessed had to be something close to near light speed. Jed was still changing positions from his fourth kill, and didn't get to the floor dweller before he saw the second on the ceiling.

Not being able to articulate any kind of intelligent thought, he yelled, "Oh f-…ceiling!" Jed panicked and then re-noticed the floor zombie that was reaching for his leg. While he was busy cursing at the thing on his leg, Mana wrenched out a hand phaser and blew the ceiling dweller to Antares Six.

Jed's panic fueled his adrenaline as he kicked the last zombie in the face. Its head snapped back and its spine contorted into a more than painful looking shape, but that didn't stop it. Now it resembled some sort of arachnid more than a human, and it scuttled up the wall.

Mana took a few pot shots at the beast but missed, and was caught off guard as it opened its mouth and sprayed a green, steaming mucus at her. Mana immediately screamed and fell to the floor, demonstrating something akin to an epileptic seizure.

Jed leveled his phaser, but felt a tight pull at his shoulder, before he could be of any use. There was an unaccounted for creature; the one that had been the victim of cannibalism. Jed screamed as he was assaulted by the thing and landed a double fisted punch in its stomach, but to no avail. The creature grabbed Jed's head and jaw, then came in for what to Jed looked like a kiss. The kiss of death.

Mana in the background could be heard, emitting a gargled scream, mixed with her erratic phaser fire. One of the beams grazed Jed's show, another was successfully dodged by the spider zombie. The third beam blew a hole through the left temple of the zombie, now centimeters away from Jed's neck.

Jed ripped the monster's hands away from his face and threw it on the ground. He grabbed his phaser from the bloody mass next to him and popped a shot right through the left eye of the spider zombie. The zombie, mid spit, slid from the wall leaving the sticky mucus behind him. Jed hit it again for good measure and ran to where Mana was thrashing on the floor, clawing at the now crystallized mucus.

Jed grabbed her shoulder and calmed her down or at least her tried to. Her seizure-like shaking made "calming" very hard. Jed gave up and rummaged through her med kit and pulled out a hypospray filled with what he hoped he remembered correctly as a sedative, and shot her full of the blue liquid. Mana's thrashing stopped almost immediately and Jed hoped that he'd put her to sleep instead of killing her. He then set his phaser to the lowest setting of stun and aimed it at Mana's face.

"I'm sorry, Mana," Jed made a hopeful face and then shot the mucus. As he'd hoped after a couple of seconds of a concentrated beam, the mucus softened back in a liquid mixture and he was able to start scraping it off of Mana's face.

"Mana," He shook her shoulder then listened close to her mask to make sure that she was still breathing. He hadn't thought of the fact that the mask would've kept her from being infected from the mucus. He hasn't even though that it would've kept her breathing through that whole ordeal.

Jed immediately felt stupid that he'd tried so hard to save her from the awful demise that she wasn't even victim to. He let out a long held breath through his teeth and almost started laughing. "Wow, great. Good job, genius. Now she's out cold and you're in a hallway filled with zombies." He sat on his knees catching his breath. "…and you're in a hallway filled with zombies…oh f-" He stood up and grabbed Mana under the armpits. He started dragging her out of the empty hall…well, dead-zombie occupied hallway, then stopped to wipe some residual mucus on his pants. He started talking to himself as a coping mechanism for the disgusting situation at hand.

"Geez," he grabbed her arm again, "'Let's go find some samples' she said," He wiped some spit out of his eye. "How'd that get there?" He started dragging Mana toward a light coming from a doorway.

Jed was about to start complaining again when he saw a shadow on the floor of the hallway. His eyes widened and his breath and the pace of his heart quickened. Jed's militaristic instincts kicked in and he silently apologized while dropped Mana on her head. He whipped his phaser from it's holster and placed a shot clean between the eyes of the being framed in the doorway.


	3. Engaged

Jed stood petrified in the hallway where he stood face to face with a man, or what looked like one.

He'd shot it right in the face, but it just stood there, staring at him.

"W-what the hell are you?" Jed's rhetorical prowess became increasingly intelligent when he was panicked. He pumped another two blasts into the creature's chest, but it just stood blinking at him. Jed finally noticed the red laser like beam coming from its eye. As Jed's brain processed the only logical explanation to the scene he'd just witnessed, he almost lost all control of his bodily functions, simultaneously feeling the urge to throw up and pee his Star Fleet regulated pants.

"Oh m-oh…I just engaged a Borg!" Jed's voice, somewhere between a squeak and a whisper was the only thing that could be heard in the hallway besides the unnatural whirring noise you often get from machines, even with the lack of outdated cogs and gears. Jed was afraid of what might come of him now that he'd just attacked the scariest creature in all of existence. His immediate thoughts were to run but then he remembered Mana slumped on the floor by his legs. He couldn't leave her but he thought that it might've been his only chance for survival. His eyes flickered towards her and he took one cautious step back.

"B-booooorg…" A voice that sounded close to creaking steel came from the creature. Jed's head snapped back to the thing and noticed that it seemed to take considerable effort on the part of the creature standing there just to say this. Its mouth hadn't moved when it spoke, and its head twitched to the left.

Jed felt like his heart was about to beat right out of his chest, as he leaned down slowly to grasp Mana's uniform. The Borg's arm was completely gone, and its circuits were exposed, sparking like lightning bugs that Jed had fond memories of playing with back on Earth. A main circuit coming out of the metal casing of the body was snaking around in mid-air, as if trying to escape. The scariest feature of this machine was its unmistakable human features. The fact that it was once human and then its body was completely defiled and abused to create the abomination that was part of the Borg collective. It couldn't be considered human anymore, and there was no help for whoever this poor soul had been in a previous life.

Even in the throes of panic and mind-numbing fear, the rational part of Jed's brain was thinking that this was the most unusual Borg he had ever seen. It didn't seem like the others, a human host that had been overcome with machinery and wires, but it seemed almost as if it had been constructed entirely of machinery, with a human façade. Could this have been some Borg attempt to create a being to infiltrate and assimilate human societies? At the moment it seemed like the only logical explanation, but in the back of Jed's mind he knew that the Borg saw value in human tissue, and that's why they bothered modifying them into their Frankenstein hybrid race. But these things didn't matter, and there certainly wasn't time to mull them over, right now all that mattered was Jed's life.

Jed couldn't understand why it hadn't attacked him yet. It must have considered him a threat by now, especially after he'd shot it in the face and chest. Maybe it was malfunctioning? Jed clung to any shred of hope that it wouldn't attack him.

The Borg creation just stood staring at him with its one remaining eye. Jed was surprised that this eye even functioned. It was leaking some sort of fluid, almost like black grease. The gooey liquid oozed down its eye socket all the way down to its chin.

Just as Jed worked up enough courage to start dragging Mana away, the creature stepped forward in what looked like another extremely calculated move. Jed was startled so badly that he fell on his butt and yelled, "STOP! What…no stop it, stay there!"

The Borg's mouth lolled open and hung there while its voice came out, this time, without the tinny old-time radio tone. "You have wounded in your p-p-party." Each stuttering syllable was accompanied by an eye and head twitch. "H-h-help." This time its mouth moved perfectly around the word. The red eye beam, so synonymous with the Borg started to flicker, then the beam widened to function as an area light and it scanned the corridor.

"W-what are you, man…there's no way you're actually a Borg…." Jed still sat on his butt as the creature kneeled and examined Mana.

"My name is D-d-data. Yo soy androide." The being made a face like he was slightly confused then touched his still existing hand to Mana's forehead.

Jed stared at him, "What? Are you even…was that English?" Jed was becoming increasingly apprehensive as the thing touched Mana's face, and Jed had to fight the urge not to bean it in the eye with his gloved fist.

"Yo creo que si," said that thing, as it looked back at Jed. "I am not a Borg." His eye twitched in an unnatural way. Jed's nerves weren't about to take much more of this creature's ambiguity.

"B-but you're a machine…but you look human…."

The thing nodded, "Yes, as I said, I am an android, and my name is Data."

"You never said that," Jed half yelled accusingly, "…an android?" Data's eye twitched again, "WOULD YOU STOP THAT!?"

Data looked a little taken aback, "Stop doing what?"

"That weird eye thing…what are you doing!?" Jed's frazzled nerves made this come out a few octaves higher than he meant, as he imitated the facial attribute.

"Me parecía haber desarrollado una interesante contracción facial, muy similar a la de mi hermano, Lore." Data's eye twitched again while Jed just stared in disbelief.

"What…what is that, man!? Are you…is that Spanish!? WHY ARE YOU SPEAKING SPANISH?" He was clearly close to ripping his own hair out. "AND WHAT IS WRONG YOU'RE YOUR EYE?"

"I said," he started, voice full of patience, "I seem to have developed an interesting facial twitch much like that of my brother, Lore."

"Ok…whatever, but you said it in Spanish." Jed was close to a heart attack and was starting to jump at any small noise.

"Spanish? Forgive me, any language circuits must be malfunctioning." Data flicked his head to the right and started speaking in an assortment of both Earth and alien languages. Jed was not entirely willing to trust this self-proclaimed android because of his current predicament but as it didn't seem entirely threatening at the moment Jed decided it was better to worry about Mana than the thing. By the time the android had finished insulting Jed in a very obscure dialect of Klingon, Jed had calmed down enough to come to the conclusion that they needed to move.


End file.
